Liveblogging the blogging panel…
Dan Gillmor: “Blogs are a proxy for something bigger. Increasingly, media that are not text will be included.”
Gillmor, cont’d: The issue is that we need to find the “good stuff,” and not go through 500 slashdot comments, or thousands of pictures of the London bombings.
David Sifry, on London bombings: Access via blogs was key. There aren’t enough journalists to get there, to get there in a timely manner and once the area was shut down to gain access.
Sifry, cont’d: Other powerful feature of blogs was that people who were near the area on 7/7 (and today) could post “I’m ok.” When the phone lines were down, relatives and friends could find out that people were alright through a parallel mechanism.
Gillmor, on Blogging and PR: “PR is a lot more than just dealing with the press…if you have to have conversations with your various constituencies.”
Allen Morgan: “You can use blogs to have conversations with your customers.”
Rich Karlgaard: “Blogs are also important with respect to product development.” Also, quoted a great story about an airline company that is being forced to address a set of product issues that were initially denied, but were brought out due to blogs (a la the Kryptonite example).
Sifry, quoting David Weinberger: “PR is no long ‘public relations,’ but now ‘public relationships.'”
Sifry: We get our best feature ideas from our users.
Ned Desmond: Editors are a tyrrannical force in the print world, but now are wanting to blog. Also are now running PopWatch, the writers love it, they can’t stop posting, and the audience loves it, sometimes getting 100 comments in an hour.
Gillmor: Protections should not cover “journalists,” and not cover “bloggers,” but should cover “journalistic acts.”
Tony Perkins: People own their words in the blogosphere, and are representing themselves. Blogs are opinion…and so are newspapers.
Sifry: The NYTimes brand stands for something, so does Forbes, so does Glenn Reynolds. “I pretty much know where the slant is.”
Desmond: Bloggers as reporter. Three top stories…Trent Lott. Dan Rather. Christmas in Cambodia, all moved by bloggers.
Gillmor: Has begun to dislike the word “objectivity.” Dropped it in favor of four other words: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, and transparency. If those things are met, readers/viewers can get a view as to what’s going on.
Sifry: Number of blogs can’t keep doubling every five months…there aren’t that many people. What is more interesting is the number of posts. What’s going to matter is attention…we all have 24 hours in a day, whether you’re Bill Gates or a Masai warrior. Additionally, blogging brings accountability to the author; you have to back up your words the next day.
Morgan: Remember, everything you write lives forever. Looking out 30 years, everything kids are written today will be discoverable.
Karlgaard: This will increase our knowledge base. The business model will be for the aggregators of this information.
Gillmor: The ecosystem that is being created around media is underway. The persistence of what we say…it’s not just text…but we’re building a surveillance society. One outcome, if we’re lucky, we’ll have a society where we’ll learn to cut each other some slack. We’ll not hold against a future President what she wrote on her weblog in high school.
Perkins: I think if big media is smart, in the future they’ll see their journalism as a “first post” and a “best guess”…and when the readers interact, big media will adjust.